As a group, we (slashdotters) could patent anything we can think of, and give the patents to the EFF. This would prevent any future abuse
Of course, what would also amuse me would be if the EFF were to be ablet o sue the RIAA or MPAA for patent enfringement in one of their copy protection technologies. That would really make me smile:)
Just a thought, but I'm sure enough of us could do it.
Yes - I like the idea of doing a Slashdot brief. After all, Slashdot readers (mostly Technical type people) have a huge interest in ensuring that the development of Open Source, Free (as in speach) software is allowed to continue.
I'd certainly sign up to this. Anyone else feel like joining in? What about CmdrTaco and the other Slashdot guys - would you be interested in this?
But I'm not sure that I agree with the part about seperating the Capitalists from the Communists. How about people like me who are uneasy with all choices?
Whatever we do, the interests of the "Elected" will always lie with the interests of those with money. That is, unless we can try and seperate them. Lets face it - those with money to influence Politicians are such a tiny minority of the population that the influence they have is unfair.
In the UK, MPs have to publically declare all interests that they have. There's a move towards limiting campaign budgets, and (hopefully) towards forced disclosure of all sums above a certain amount. Other protection schemes (like blind campaign funds where the PM does not know who is paying for his TV campaign) are used as well.
None of this is perfect. It probably doesn't go far enough. But only by removing the money from politics will we ever hope to achieve sense from it.
When Corporations no longer have such a huge influence over Politicians, then someone might start to sit down and think "what would be the best thing for society" rather than "what will please my campaign contributors most." The length of Patents and Copyrights might be shortened to cope with the increasing speed of change. And, yes, outrageous abuses of the law (MPAA, RIAA anyone) and attempts to create new laws to protect these companies might be thrown out with the contempt that they deserve.
The greatest strength of humanity is neither our Science, our Technology, or our Military. It is our diversity.
Why did we as a species survive the Black Death in Europe? How do we ensure the proliferation of the species in the face of so many unknowns:- new diseases, climatic variations, emergance of new rivals...? Simple - we diversify.
Having a very diverse pool makes a species resilliant. For individuals, it tends to suck, but for the species as a whole it's Nature's best way of ensuring that we survive in the face of unknown dangers. Give us diversity, and allow the species to adapt.
Many of the so-called genetic "disorders" that people complain of are theref or a very good reason. My strongest example is Sickle Cell Anaemia in Africa. The reason this fatal (recessive) genetic disorder has not been eliminated is because in it's inactive state it confers some resistance to Malaria
Bizarrely enough, the same thing seems to be true with culture. A diverse cultuure is a vibrant, thriving one. Culture dominated by one group becomes bland, grey, and less free.
I've always considered that the great joke of life is that diversity is our strength, and yet so many people seem to loathe it. "We don't like you new folks round here, with your foreign ways..." Someone up there really knew how to stitch us up:)
But broadly, I'm oppossed to Human Cloning because I see vast moral issues here, and because I feel that the process of duplicating an existing Human does not do anything to strengthen our culture. The potential for abuse horrifies me.
Actually, you raise a good point. It's important that we are able to recognise things for what they are.
To play Devil's Advocate, if Coca-Cola were not allowed to defend their Trademarks, then other people might emulate them with potentially dangerous products. This would also mean that we couldn't realistically sue them if they made a mistake in the making of their products as we would have no way of knowing if they actually made it.
Us being able to uniquely identify any company is a good thing for both Big Business and Real People. I just wish they'd stop being so damn aggressive in pursuing it.
As an aside, what is the largest number of people ever sued in one case? The answer "It was the entire of California in the case Person X v The State of California" will not receive credit:)
Over here in Eurpoe, we've had emissions control for years now. The Government occasionally runs ads encouraging people to use less energy. And shock horror the majority of people I know support environmental regulations
Why? Because we appreciate that there are finite amounts of resources, and that we have to manage not squander them. I'm fed up of hearing from Americans how bad environmental regulations are because "they hurt our bottom line." Another piece of myth designed by right wing Conservatives who are too afraid of change.
Car sales are still doing well, few people object to having to ditch the old cars (many of which are far more dangerous, less fuel efficient, have fewer features, and require lots of expensive maintenance anyway) and recycling initiatives are growing. Hardly the "Corporate Nightmare" the Conservatives would have you believe.
I am really starting to dispair of people trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with my life. Already today we've had the War On Drugs and now the "War on Piracy." Both of these seem to look to outlaw people who do not have the traditional, Conservative, "Old Ways" of doing things. Both seem to really be a war on people who are open to new ideas. And both seem to be unstoppable.
I always remember a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm:-
The animals huddled about Clover, not speaking. The knoll where they were lying gave them a wide prospect across the countryside. Most of Animal Farm was within their view-the long pasture stretching down to the main road, the hayfield, the spinney, the drinking pool, the ploughed fields where the young wheat was thick and green, and the red roofs of the farm buildings with the smoke curling from the chimneys. It was a clear spring evening. The grass and the bursting hedges were gilded by the level rays of the sun. Never had the farm-and with a kind of surprise they remembered that it was their own farm, every inch of it their own property-appeared to the animals so desirable a place. As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had
set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger
and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major's speech. Instead-she did not know why-they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes. There was no thought of rebellion or disobedience
in her mind. She knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings. Whatever happened she would remain
faithful, work hard, carry out the orders that were given to her, and accept the leadership of Napoleon. But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled. It was not for this that they had built the
windmill and faced the bullets of Jones's gun. Such were her thoughts, though she lacked the words to express them.
The film "The Beach", whilst being pretty awful, probably aimed to explore the same idea: Given total freedom, a tropical paradise, and a bunch of people all with the idea of escaping from current society, social interactions with other people always seem to destroy paradise. It seems to be a recurring theme throughout history - is this just a natural consequence of the way we are, or is it possible to actually ever build a truly free state?
One of the things we do is allow you to design your own databases online.
You can have a look at our site on http://212.135.97.32 (whilst the domain propogates). This is still a pre-launch version - so be gentle with it:) Official version is likely to be out within the next 2 weeks.
I agree that a lot of the fuss here has come about because Linus is involved in Transmeta. But there's a lot more to their technology than Intel's speedstep.
Processors with multiple execution units have become very common. They work by looking for instruction level parallelism - in short, if 2 instructions use totally different registers, whose operands have already been computed, then you can execute them in parallel.
Modern processors tend to support out of order execution and use branch prediction to avoid wasting clock cycles. Both of these, combined with several execution units, make your processor very fast - but use a huge amount of silicon area (read: lots of power, space that could otherwise be used for cache, etc). Their other big problem is that they look at the program from scratch each time it is executed - which means they can't avoid old mistakes.
The idea that Transmeta had is as revolutionary as the early RISC philosophy. The original observation that lead to RISC was that compilers don't tend to make use of the more complicated CISC instructions (string operations, polynomial evaluation on VAX, etc) and that these operations require a lot of hardware to implement, and as such slow down the processor. The RISC goal was to use a small number of relatively simple instructions. This means that you need fewer transistors on the processor, which means that it uses less power. Having fewer transistors generally makes the processors critical path shorter as well, which allows it to be clocked faster. In addition, the simple RISC instructions allow easy pipelining - which in itself leads to a huge speed benefit.
However, modern RISC processors are much more complex than their ancestors. They support many more instructions, and implement things like dynamic instruction scheduling. This has lead to RISC chips using more and more silicon.
Transmeta's idea is to go through the same process of reducing the complexity of the processor once more. They save a lot of silicon by shifting work onto the compiler.
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. The compiler is responsible for allocating registers, so it already knows about instruction level parallelism, and therefore it knows which instructions can be executed in parallel. If you let the compiler tell you this, rather than working it out in hardware every time you run your program, you can potentially save a lot of wasted silicon.
Transmeta went for code morphing because it saves people having to re-compile code to run on their processor. They gain the benefits describes above, without the huge cost of trying to replace the x86 instruction set. Their code-morphing engine effectively translates x86 (ar any other architecture they want to implement) into native instructions. It finds instruction level parallelism, and exploits this in native code (the Transmeta can execute 4 32-bit instructions simultaneously - although you are limited in what operations can be caried out at the same time).
By having the compiler do all of the work in scheduling instructions, they allow a huge amount of silicon to be saved - therefore reducing power consumption and allowing faster clock speeds.
There are more benefits. The code morphing engine can heavily optimise frequently used blocks of code. Potentially, they could store information about the behaviour of a jump instruction in their code, to allow them to do much better branch prediction. If you've seen the program execute 500 times, you've got a pretty good idea how it's going to behave next time in a lot of cases.
The point is that the x86 architecture has been a problem for a long time. It's old, slow, and difficult to optimise. What Transmeta have done is to find a nice, neat way to eliminate the problems caused by old ISAs. Effectively, they use a 2 stage compilation. Sun do this with Java - compile code to Java Binaries (platform independant) and then use a native Virtual Machine to run these. Transmeta are applying a similar concept, in a radical new way to their processor. The x86 instruction set is being used as the platform independant middle stage in their model. It gets compiled and optimised to native code by their code morphing engine. They've also been able to save a lot of silicon in the process.
And, since their code morphing engine knows a lot more about the machine it's running on (cache size / associativity, memory size, etc) it can probably do a better job of compiling code than most x86 compilers can. Gcc and the like are good - but if they have to support machines with many memory sizes, configurations, and know nothing about caches and the like, then there's only so much they can do.
Make no mistake, I believe that Transmeta has revolutionary ideas that will change the face of computing. No longer will legacy hardware be a problem for chip designers. Using the hybrid approach developed by Transmeta will allow faster and faster processor designs, taking full advantage of modern ideas, whilst still supporting legacy ISAs. It's a fantastic concept, and I hope they go all the way with it.
Yeah - a few points. I'm running a comapny, and we've got an RaQ3 from Verio We're a UK based company, and so expect to pay a lot more for bandwidth (at least, until BT see sense). But they offer a reasonable deal, and the best Customer Support I've seen in a while.
Disclaimer: I'm don't work for them or anyone related to them.
The RaQ3s have some kind of strange warranty on them from Cobalt. Basically, you're allowed to install new stuff - but you're not allowed to piss with any of their system files, or do anything "dodgy" like adding users without using their custom web interface. It's based on a port of Redhat 5.2. But they seem to be reliable machines - and I'd have to say I was pretty pleased with them overall.
One thing that occured to me is that it will be tricky to guarantee integrity using this scheme. The reason one time pads are so secure is that any given string can be turned into another of the same length by XOR-ing it with a suitable "key." What this means is that you can't simply try out random keys to see if one decrypts to something "meaningful" as it's possible to produce every meaningful message with that length under a suitable "key".
Translation:- if I want to get you in trouble, and I can prove you wrote a particular pad, then I simply work out the message I want to be in that file, calculate the "key" that would be needed to get that message out of your pad, and post it myself. Then, an few days later, I announce that your pad, with my pad, combine to produce a dodgy message, and voila! The police are after you.
Proving that you wrote the message would be tricky - but not impossible. Potentially, I could even arrange for your file to contain a reference to you - so that you would be investigated anyway.
The lack of integrity is the biggest problem with this scheme. I'm also worried about re-using the pads. I know it's possible to decrypt two messages encrypted under the same pad - is this likely to be a concern? Given the large number of pads that'd be out there, I doubt it - but if you were careless.....
Of course, there's still the issue of how we make so much "random" data.....:)
How about when Movie companies start demanding the ability to stop you watching a film as well as knowing when you're watching it. Kind of like pay per view. Only you buy a disc, and they use a serial number on the movie to "allow" you to watch it when you pay them.
More to the point, the movie industry would know *everyone's* viewing habits. They would know exactly what type of films any individual liked to watch. Aside from the sheer volume of "targeted advertising" that this would generate (read: junk mail), and the (horrifying) telemarketing potential, would you really feel comfortable letting these corporations know so much about you? They've already demonstrated that the can't be trusted to act intelligently due to the whole DeCSS mess. I certainly don't want to give them details of my private life
The only problem with designating an entire TLD to porn sites is that they just won't stick to it.
What you'll find happening, I imagine, is that the owners of these sites will register the.xxx domains - however this won't stop them using the.com domains at all. Imagine - a porn site owner's worst nightmare would be the abiliy for people to exclude their sites from search engines. In the interest of maximising hits, they will want to appear on the search engines as often as possible - and so they won't confine themselves in a way that allows them to be ignored.
It'd be good to be able to exclude the seedier side of the net, and it may also have political benefits. Politicians would no longer be able to push through anti-privacy laws in the interests of "protecting the Children" or other lame excuses that are commonly used to undermine our privacy.
I too spent about 3 years working in Tech Support, before (thankfully) escaping. And I fully agree - most callers to tech support give off the impression of having a freezing point IQ
I think that half the problem is caused by the tech support lines themselves, though. If you give someone the impression that there's a nice voice at the other end of the phone that'll sort out all of your problems, then why should they think about solving them themselves?
Another side to the problem is that most people don't really have a clear idea what they want their PC for. Believe me, most people buy Computers because their neighbour has one, and they don't want to be left out. I've even had people come to the Tech Support desk, and tell me they want to buy a computer because their daughter has brought home "this thing" (holds up a floppy disk). PCs are fantastic machines - if you have a reason for owning one. But unless you've got an idea what you're trying to achieve, you've got no hope.
It also seems that a certain amount of computer knowledge is essential. This means that your O/S must demand that you gain a certain amount of knowledge - hopefully through the use of the O/S itself. If you don't have a vague idea how this thing works, how are you supposed to solve your own problems? Windoze tries to hide all of the inner workings of the PC from the user, and then people wonder why callers have no idea how to solve "trivial" problems. Remember that to them, the problem is totally outside of the machines expected behaviour - and they therefore have no idea where to begin.
Make no mistake, I'm all for PCs being user friendly. But people have to be introduced (gradually) to some of the concepts behind this swish new desktop they look at. If we don't introduce them to these concepts, then they're never going to be able to solve their own problems. And that means the tech support enquiries are going to get worse and worse.
The fact that it is possible to use a technology for things which are wrong does not mean that that technology should be banned. MP3 is a fantastic format, that has so many potential uses. Even the DeCSS program has valuable uses - in particular, it allows people to view the DVDs that they've legally bought under Linux.
Sure, MP3s make it possible to trade music illegaly. DeCSS may allow people to trade films illegaly online when bandwidth increases. But does that mean that the technology itself is in some sense "illegal?" I, for one, certainly hope not. These programs/file formats have valuable applications as well as illegal ones, but it is the users who decide how to use them.
One major technology that allowed a previously restricted comodity to be brought to a mass market faster, cheaper, and better than before was the printing press. Who, in hindsight, would argue that the printing press was a bad innovation? It totally changed the availability and quality of information available at the time, and the internet offers us the same opportunities. Potentially, as he says, you could access any book, any film, any piece of music ever produced, instantly. Hopefully, however, we'll be able to use this idea to reward artists, and cut out parasites like him.
I don't agree with what Napster is doing - the ability to share files with people is fantastic, but the people who are loosing out at the moment are the artists. What we really want to do is screw people like Edgar Bronfmanm - the people who currently make a killing out of the work of others. They're the ones who stand to loose out of this new information age, and rightly so.
It irritates me that when I purchase a CD, the artist will be gaining a tiny share out of the money I spend. What I'd like to achieve is a situation where it is worthwhile for artists to produce good art, and for them to be justly rewarded for it. What I want to avoid is the internet being run by fat-cat tycoons, and people who make their entire living off the backs of others.
The internet is not a Communist state, it's a Democratic state, where people are entitled to their own views and ideas. People who provide vaulable services on the internet become well known. Those who try to sell on the work of others get ignored. That is what scares him about the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, there is one alternative....
As a group, we (slashdotters) could patent anything we can think of, and give the patents to the EFF. This would prevent any future abuse
Of course, what would also amuse me would be if the EFF were to be ablet o sue the RIAA or MPAA for patent enfringement in one of their copy protection technologies. That would really make me smile :)
Just a thought, but I'm sure enough of us could do it.
Sorry, my spelling sucks. Hit the submit button instead of preview again
Yes - I like the idea of doing a Slashdot brief. After all, Slashdot readers (mostly Technical type people) have a huge interest in ensuring that the development of Open Source, Free (as in speach) software is allowed to continue.
I'd certainly sign up to this. Anyone else feel like joining in? What about CmdrTaco and the other Slashdot guys - would you be interested in this?
A very well thought out comment :)
But I'm not sure that I agree with the part about seperating the Capitalists from the Communists. How about people like me who are uneasy with all choices?
Whatever we do, the interests of the "Elected" will always lie with the interests of those with money. That is, unless we can try and seperate them. Lets face it - those with money to influence Politicians are such a tiny minority of the population that the influence they have is unfair.
In the UK, MPs have to publically declare all interests that they have. There's a move towards limiting campaign budgets, and (hopefully) towards forced disclosure of all sums above a certain amount. Other protection schemes (like blind campaign funds where the PM does not know who is paying for his TV campaign) are used as well.
None of this is perfect. It probably doesn't go far enough. But only by removing the money from politics will we ever hope to achieve sense from it.
When Corporations no longer have such a huge influence over Politicians, then someone might start to sit down and think "what would be the best thing for society" rather than "what will please my campaign contributors most." The length of Patents and Copyrights might be shortened to cope with the increasing speed of change. And, yes, outrageous abuses of the law (MPAA, RIAA anyone) and attempts to create new laws to protect these companies might be thrown out with the contempt that they deserve.
Sigh. I dream too much.
The greatest strength of humanity is neither our Science, our Technology, or our Military. It is our diversity.
Why did we as a species survive the Black Death in Europe? How do we ensure the proliferation of the species in the face of so many unknowns:- new diseases, climatic variations, emergance of new rivals...? Simple - we diversify.
Having a very diverse pool makes a species resilliant. For individuals, it tends to suck, but for the species as a whole it's Nature's best way of ensuring that we survive in the face of unknown dangers. Give us diversity, and allow the species to adapt.
Many of the so-called genetic "disorders" that people complain of are theref or a very good reason. My strongest example is Sickle Cell Anaemia in Africa. The reason this fatal (recessive) genetic disorder has not been eliminated is because in it's inactive state it confers some resistance to Malaria
Bizarrely enough, the same thing seems to be true with culture. A diverse cultuure is a vibrant, thriving one. Culture dominated by one group becomes bland, grey, and less free.
I've always considered that the great joke of life is that diversity is our strength, and yet so many people seem to loathe it. "We don't like you new folks round here, with your foreign ways..." Someone up there really knew how to stitch us up :)
But broadly, I'm oppossed to Human Cloning because I see vast moral issues here, and because I feel that the process of duplicating an existing Human does not do anything to strengthen our culture. The potential for abuse horrifies me.
Actually, you raise a good point. It's important that we are able to recognise things for what they are.
To play Devil's Advocate, if Coca-Cola were not allowed to defend their Trademarks, then other people might emulate them with potentially dangerous products. This would also mean that we couldn't realistically sue them if they made a mistake in the making of their products as we would have no way of knowing if they actually made it.
Us being able to uniquely identify any company is a good thing for both Big Business and Real People. I just wish they'd stop being so damn aggressive in pursuing it.
As an aside, what is the largest number of people ever sued in one case? The answer "It was the entire of California in the case Person X v The State of California" will not receive credit :)
Over here in Eurpoe, we've had emissions control for years now. The Government occasionally runs ads encouraging people to use less energy. And shock horror the majority of people I know support environmental regulations
Why? Because we appreciate that there are finite amounts of resources, and that we have to manage not squander them. I'm fed up of hearing from Americans how bad environmental regulations are because "they hurt our bottom line." Another piece of myth designed by right wing Conservatives who are too afraid of change.
Car sales are still doing well, few people object to having to ditch the old cars (many of which are far more dangerous, less fuel efficient, have fewer features, and require lots of expensive maintenance anyway) and recycling initiatives are growing. Hardly the "Corporate Nightmare" the Conservatives would have you believe.
I am really starting to dispair of people trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with my life. Already today we've had the War On Drugs and now the "War on Piracy." Both of these seem to look to outlaw people who do not have the traditional, Conservative, "Old Ways" of doing things. Both seem to really be a war on people who are open to new ideas. And both seem to be unstoppable.
I always remember a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm:-
The film "The Beach", whilst being pretty awful, probably aimed to explore the same idea: Given total freedom, a tropical paradise, and a bunch of people all with the idea of escaping from current society, social interactions with other people always seem to destroy paradise. It seems to be a recurring theme throughout history - is this just a natural consequence of the way we are, or is it possible to actually ever build a truly free state?
One of the things we do is allow you to design your own databases online.
You can have a look at our site on http://212.135.97.32 (whilst the domain propogates). This is still a pre-launch version - so be gentle with it :) Official version is likely to be out within the next 2 weeks.
Dan
I agree that a lot of the fuss here has come about because Linus is involved in Transmeta. But there's a lot more to their technology than Intel's speedstep.
Processors with multiple execution units have become very common. They work by looking for instruction level parallelism - in short, if 2 instructions use totally different registers, whose operands have already been computed, then you can execute them in parallel.
Modern processors tend to support out of order execution and use branch prediction to avoid wasting clock cycles. Both of these, combined with several execution units, make your processor very fast - but use a huge amount of silicon area (read: lots of power, space that could otherwise be used for cache, etc). Their other big problem is that they look at the program from scratch each time it is executed - which means they can't avoid old mistakes.
The idea that Transmeta had is as revolutionary as the early RISC philosophy. The original observation that lead to RISC was that compilers don't tend to make use of the more complicated CISC instructions (string operations, polynomial evaluation on VAX, etc) and that these operations require a lot of hardware to implement, and as such slow down the processor. The RISC goal was to use a small number of relatively simple instructions. This means that you need fewer transistors on the processor, which means that it uses less power. Having fewer transistors generally makes the processors critical path shorter as well, which allows it to be clocked faster. In addition, the simple RISC instructions allow easy pipelining - which in itself leads to a huge speed benefit.
However, modern RISC processors are much more complex than their ancestors. They support many more instructions, and implement things like dynamic instruction scheduling. This has lead to RISC chips using more and more silicon.
Transmeta's idea is to go through the same process of reducing the complexity of the processor once more. They save a lot of silicon by shifting work onto the compiler.
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. The compiler is responsible for allocating registers, so it already knows about instruction level parallelism, and therefore it knows which instructions can be executed in parallel. If you let the compiler tell you this, rather than working it out in hardware every time you run your program, you can potentially save a lot of wasted silicon.
Transmeta went for code morphing because it saves people having to re-compile code to run on their processor. They gain the benefits describes above, without the huge cost of trying to replace the x86 instruction set. Their code-morphing engine effectively translates x86 (ar any other architecture they want to implement) into native instructions. It finds instruction level parallelism, and exploits this in native code (the Transmeta can execute 4 32-bit instructions simultaneously - although you are limited in what operations can be caried out at the same time).
By having the compiler do all of the work in scheduling instructions, they allow a huge amount of silicon to be saved - therefore reducing power consumption and allowing faster clock speeds.
There are more benefits. The code morphing engine can heavily optimise frequently used blocks of code. Potentially, they could store information about the behaviour of a jump instruction in their code, to allow them to do much better branch prediction. If you've seen the program execute 500 times, you've got a pretty good idea how it's going to behave next time in a lot of cases.
The point is that the x86 architecture has been a problem for a long time. It's old, slow, and difficult to optimise. What Transmeta have done is to find a nice, neat way to eliminate the problems caused by old ISAs. Effectively, they use a 2 stage compilation. Sun do this with Java - compile code to Java Binaries (platform independant) and then use a native Virtual Machine to run these. Transmeta are applying a similar concept, in a radical new way to their processor. The x86 instruction set is being used as the platform independant middle stage in their model. It gets compiled and optimised to native code by their code morphing engine. They've also been able to save a lot of silicon in the process.
And, since their code morphing engine knows a lot more about the machine it's running on (cache size / associativity, memory size, etc) it can probably do a better job of compiling code than most x86 compilers can. Gcc and the like are good - but if they have to support machines with many memory sizes, configurations, and know nothing about caches and the like, then there's only so much they can do.
Make no mistake, I believe that Transmeta has revolutionary ideas that will change the face of computing. No longer will legacy hardware be a problem for chip designers. Using the hybrid approach developed by Transmeta will allow faster and faster processor designs, taking full advantage of modern ideas, whilst still supporting legacy ISAs. It's a fantastic concept, and I hope they go all the way with it.
Yeah - a few points. I'm running a comapny, and we've got an RaQ3 from Verio We're a UK based company, and so expect to pay a lot more for bandwidth (at least, until BT see sense). But they offer a reasonable deal, and the best Customer Support I've seen in a while.
Disclaimer: I'm don't work for them or anyone related to them.
The RaQ3s have some kind of strange warranty on them from Cobalt. Basically, you're allowed to install new stuff - but you're not allowed to piss with any of their system files, or do anything "dodgy" like adding users without using their custom web interface. It's based on a port of Redhat 5.2. But they seem to be reliable machines - and I'd have to say I was pretty pleased with them overall.
One thing that occured to me is that it will be tricky to guarantee integrity using this scheme. The reason one time pads are so secure is that any given string can be turned into another of the same length by XOR-ing it with a suitable "key." What this means is that you can't simply try out random keys to see if one decrypts to something "meaningful" as it's possible to produce every meaningful message with that length under a suitable "key".
Translation:- if I want to get you in trouble, and I can prove you wrote a particular pad, then I simply work out the message I want to be in that file, calculate the "key" that would be needed to get that message out of your pad, and post it myself. Then, an few days later, I announce that your pad, with my pad, combine to produce a dodgy message, and voila! The police are after you.
Proving that you wrote the message would be tricky - but not impossible. Potentially, I could even arrange for your file to contain a reference to you - so that you would be investigated anyway.
The lack of integrity is the biggest problem with this scheme. I'm also worried about re-using the pads. I know it's possible to decrypt two messages encrypted under the same pad - is this likely to be a concern? Given the large number of pads that'd be out there, I doubt it - but if you were careless.....
Of course, there's still the issue of how we make so much "random" data..... :)
I think it's even worse than that...
How about when Movie companies start demanding the ability to stop you watching a film as well as knowing when you're watching it. Kind of like pay per view. Only you buy a disc, and they use a serial number on the movie to "allow" you to watch it when you pay them.
More to the point, the movie industry would know *everyone's* viewing habits. They would know exactly what type of films any individual liked to watch. Aside from the sheer volume of "targeted advertising" that this would generate (read: junk mail), and the (horrifying) telemarketing potential, would you really feel comfortable letting these corporations know so much about you? They've already demonstrated that the can't be trusted to act intelligently due to the whole DeCSS mess. I certainly don't want to give them details of my private life
Just my 2 pence worth
The only problem with designating an entire TLD to porn sites is that they just won't stick to it.
What you'll find happening, I imagine, is that the owners of these sites will register the .xxx domains - however this won't stop them using the .com domains at all. Imagine - a porn site owner's worst nightmare would be the abiliy for people to exclude their sites from search engines. In the interest of maximising hits, they will want to appear on the search engines as often as possible - and so they won't confine themselves in a way that allows them to be ignored.
It'd be good to be able to exclude the seedier side of the net, and it may also have political benefits. Politicians would no longer be able to push through anti-privacy laws in the interests of "protecting the Children" or other lame excuses that are commonly used to undermine our privacy.
Unfortunately, I just can't see it working.
I too spent about 3 years working in Tech Support, before (thankfully) escaping. And I fully agree - most callers to tech support give off the impression of having a freezing point IQ
I think that half the problem is caused by the tech support lines themselves, though. If you give someone the impression that there's a nice voice at the other end of the phone that'll sort out all of your problems, then why should they think about solving them themselves?
Another side to the problem is that most people don't really have a clear idea what they want their PC for. Believe me, most people buy Computers because their neighbour has one, and they don't want to be left out. I've even had people come to the Tech Support desk, and tell me they want to buy a computer because their daughter has brought home "this thing" (holds up a floppy disk). PCs are fantastic machines - if you have a reason for owning one. But unless you've got an idea what you're trying to achieve, you've got no hope.
It also seems that a certain amount of computer knowledge is essential. This means that your O/S must demand that you gain a certain amount of knowledge - hopefully through the use of the O/S itself. If you don't have a vague idea how this thing works, how are you supposed to solve your own problems? Windoze tries to hide all of the inner workings of the PC from the user, and then people wonder why callers have no idea how to solve "trivial" problems. Remember that to them, the problem is totally outside of the machines expected behaviour - and they therefore have no idea where to begin.
Make no mistake, I'm all for PCs being user friendly. But people have to be introduced (gradually) to some of the concepts behind this swish new desktop they look at. If we don't introduce them to these concepts, then they're never going to be able to solve their own problems. And that means the tech support enquiries are going to get worse and worse.
The fact that it is possible to use a technology for things which are wrong does not mean that that technology should be banned. MP3 is a fantastic format, that has so many potential uses. Even the DeCSS program has valuable uses - in particular, it allows people to view the DVDs that they've legally bought under Linux.
Sure, MP3s make it possible to trade music illegaly. DeCSS may allow people to trade films illegaly online when bandwidth increases. But does that mean that the technology itself is in some sense "illegal?" I, for one, certainly hope not. These programs/file formats have valuable applications as well as illegal ones, but it is the users who decide how to use them.
One major technology that allowed a previously restricted comodity to be brought to a mass market faster, cheaper, and better than before was the printing press. Who, in hindsight, would argue that the printing press was a bad innovation? It totally changed the availability and quality of information available at the time, and the internet offers us the same opportunities. Potentially, as he says, you could access any book, any film, any piece of music ever produced, instantly. Hopefully, however, we'll be able to use this idea to reward artists, and cut out parasites like him.
I don't agree with what Napster is doing - the ability to share files with people is fantastic, but the people who are loosing out at the moment are the artists. What we really want to do is screw people like Edgar Bronfmanm - the people who currently make a killing out of the work of others. They're the ones who stand to loose out of this new information age, and rightly so.
It irritates me that when I purchase a CD, the artist will be gaining a tiny share out of the money I spend. What I'd like to achieve is a situation where it is worthwhile for artists to produce good art, and for them to be justly rewarded for it. What I want to avoid is the internet being run by fat-cat tycoons, and people who make their entire living off the backs of others.
The internet is not a Communist state, it's a Democratic state, where people are entitled to their own views and ideas. People who provide vaulable services on the internet become well known. Those who try to sell on the work of others get ignored. That is what scares him about the internet.